Haddington Island belongs to the Alert Bay Volcanic Belt, a chain of eroded volcanoes stretching from Brooks Peninsula northeastward across Vancouver Island to Port McNeill. The island formed roughly 3.7 million years ago, when the Juan de Fuca and Explorer plates ground beneath the North American Plate at the Cascadia subduction zone. What rose from that collision was a fine-grained volcanic rock -- light blue-grey to warm brown-grey, with a groundmass of 80 to 85 percent plagioclase feldspar, shot through with quartz, biotite, and magnetite. Geologists commonly call it andesite, though its chemical composition technically makes it dacite. Whatever the label, the stone proved remarkably resistant to weathering, and remarkably beautiful when carved.

In 1893, the young English architect Francis Rattenbury won the commission to design British Columbia's new parliament buildings. He needed an exterior stone that could hold fine ornamental detail and endure the Victoria climate. He chose the light pearl-grey volcanic rock from Haddington Island. The quarry struggled to keep pace -- by April 1894, deliveries were falling behind, and some stone was of poor quality, fit only for the rear walls. But the front facades, the ones visitors would admire for generations, got Haddington's best. When the Parliament Buildings opened in 1898, the stone's reputation was sealed. Demand followed: the Hotel Vancouver, the Vancouver Law Courts, Heritage Hall, and the Ogden Point breakwater in Victoria all used Haddington Island stone. From the 1890s through the mid-1960s, the island was one of British Columbia's most important building stone sources.

Architectural tastes shifted after the Second World War. Concrete and glass replaced carved stone. The Haddington Island quarry fell quiet in 1966, and for nearly four decades the island sat deserted -- its wharf rotting, its quarry faces exposed to rain and moss. Then in 2004, Haddington Island Stoneworks of Vancouver reopened operations. Heritage restoration projects needed authentic matching stone for aging facades. The very durability that had made Haddington stone famous meant the original buildings were still standing, still worth maintaining, and still demanding the same material. The quarry's second life is quieter than its first, but it connects a 21st-century craft to a 19th-century vision.

Haddington Island is too small to appear on most maps and too remote for casual visitors. The closest community is Port McNeill on Vancouver Island. There are no ferries, no services, no population. What there is, is geology written into architecture hundreds of kilometers away -- in the carved faces and pilasters of the Parliament Buildings, in the banded walls of heritage buildings on Vancouver's streets. The island is named for Thomas Hamilton, 9th Earl of Haddington, a figure far less memorable than the stone that carries his name. From the air, it reads as just another forested island in the strait. Its real story is in the buildings that stand because of what was taken from it.